Capers With Carroll

(We interrupt the previously scheduled episode recapping my 1972 Coming-of-Age Jaunt through Europe, to interject this Thanksgiving message.)

I am thankful, three weeks before my 73rd birthday, that most of my deadlines these days are self-imposed and freely adjusted. Had I been able to maintain my original plan, this week would have had readers with me in Jerusalem, where I celebrated my 1972 Thanksgiving meal with a jar of peanut butter and the loaf of bread I hoped to stretch for a few more days. Instead, the recap falls short by six weeks and eleven nations. I was still in England, and still thinking I would spend most of my sojourn in France. I anticipated upgrading my high school French and working on my novel. I certainly had no inkling of getting as far as Israel. I had, however, just committed to visiting a new friend in Switzerland.

I give thanks for my God-bestowed but only-recently-acknowledged ADHD. Even as—at this stage in life—unfinished projects challenge me in space and time, the fascinating twists and turns of my distractibility refuse to let me become bored. I am rich in both hobbies and relationships. All by itself, my whimsey in spiders has brought me friendly correspondents on six of the seven continents. My early teaching career allowed me to teach groups of junior high students, and in some cases, my later career brought me their children and grandchildren. Members of each group now show-up richly on my FB friends list. As God supplied me with diverse teaching venues, I once had a class of Cacua-speaking adults from the remote jungles of Colombia. They needed the basics of government and economics to help them pass their (Spanish-language) primary-school equivalency exams. We taught the class tri-lingually. Later, in China, I had three weeks with high school and college students who hoped to improve their English. Over the years, God gave me experiences with both public and Christian school students in California. In the middle, for a decade, I taught a tightly-knit cadre of students in Colombia. Some of those children I had the privilege of shepherding from fifth grade through twelfth, and I’m able to correspond with them now as adults. For all this I am thankful.

I am thankful for the families God has given me, both the family of my birth, and the family I began 50 years ago (next July) by marrying Vicki. In July, I camped with the cousins among whom I grew up. We who could remember our wonderful grandparents and great-grandmother could now see each other’s grandchildren. This week, Vicki and I have three of our five children, with their spouses, and seven of our fourteen grandchildren. My step-counter tells me that in the five days since the grandkids arrived, my daily walking stats double over the average from the previous six weeks. Few gratifications in life can match watching grandchildren grow and their parents negotiating the challenges. The oldest two boys have their voices changing. The younger ones still want to cuddle with Papa and have stories read. I also thank God for the amazing technology that allows me to teleport to Brazil to help homeschool my grandsons there, and then zoom over to England to keep current on the antics of my British grands.

My life puts flesh to the end-time description given by God to Daniel, “Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall increase.” (Dan. 12:4, ESV). Living now, two-and-a-half millennia after God instructed Daniel to “shut up the words and seal the book, until the time of the end,” I am grateful to have a storehouse of ‘to-and-fro’ memories from visits to twenty-some countries. I also carry more information through my pocket phone than Ben Franklin or Thomas Jefferson could access had they owned every book then in print. I am thankful for capabilities unavailable to any previous generation. I am also grateful for the Scriptures that provide a solid place to stand as floodwaters shift the sand from all around us.

As a child born just at the end of two World Wars, I have lived through a Cold War and times of increasingly dangerous proxy wars. I am thankful that both I and my children have been spared the call to arms. Amidst ‘wars and rumors of war,’ I am thankful that, in my call to overseas service, I could carry literacy rather than kill-or-be-killed armaments. I could spread the Word of Life rather than the Kiss of Death. I am thankful to be living in a pocket of peace, the likes of which so many in our world are unable to enjoy. I am not facing a winter without heating, nor the threat of incoming missiles. I have done nothing to deserve these blessings that I enjoy, just as many of the people without them have done nothing to deserve their absence. Even in Colombia, which was struggling with a civil war within our earshot, I could say, as did David, “In peace I will lie down and sleep, for you alone, LORD, make me dwell in safety.” (Psalm 4:8). For this I am thankful.

(A conversation, just now, with my Brazilian son-in-law reminds me how thankful I am to be familiar with the tastes of both the peaches, apricots, and plums that won’t grow in the tropics, and the tree-ripened mangoes, papayas, and bananas that only show up in North American grocery stores with a pittance of their sweetness and flavor. I have tasted avocadoes, sweet and creamy as only the tropics can produce them, but have temperate-zone persimmons in the back yard as I write this.)

I am thankful that though riches and fame were never high on my list of ambitions, God’s plan for my life has delivered for me a modest level of each. I enjoy a nice house, a satisfactory pension, and a yard big enough to entertain my horticultural curiosities. Although—as late as 2016—I entertained no ambition to run for elective office, in 2018, I finished ahead of the Libertarian in my race for Congress, and in 2020, an amazing 42,015 voters marked their presidential ballots for me. I am thankful for each one of you. That total exceeds even the popular votes for George Washington (39,624 in 1788-89, and 28,300 in 1792) and for John Adams (35,726 in 1796). I am thankful that both Washington and Adams performed so well in the strenuous times with which they were faced—as have generations of patriots since—and that my family and I can enjoy the benefits thereof. I pray that those benefits will continue.

Even as God blessed me in ways I never sought, He has also gratified the desires I did entertain. I wanted to leave the world a better place for my having been here. Now, I can look at five grown children who are each contributing to the betterment of mankind. I can look at three generations of students whose lives I have touched. I can see riders lined up to utilize a bus system for which God put me in the right place at the right time to help get started. I can look back at teenagers I encouraged in the 1980s—coming from the pre-literate, indigenous peoples of Colombia—students who went on to graduate from prestigious universities, and who now supervise educational systems they have built from the ground up, on land to which their people now hold legal title. I hear of hundreds now worshipping Jesus among people-groups that had none fourty or fifty years ago. Oh, the marvels I have witnessed! Thank you, LORD!

On this Thanksgiving Day, 2022, I pray that each of my readers will enjoy a time of family and good food. I pray for God’s peace among those, worldwide, who currently feel the weight of man’s free will, expressed as it so often is, as man’s inhumanity to man. Come quickly, Lord Jesus.

Last month’s Capers tribute to the DC-3 became part of a conversation, both here and on Facebook, that included several of my former students and a couple of students who graduated from Lomalinda before my time.

Garth Harms obtained this picture from photographer Jeff Evans, who spent a couple of months in Colombia just before I got there. That dates the picture to late ’83 or early ’84.



Photo by Jeff Evans


It’s authentic, right down to the left-wheel and rear-wheel ruts where the plane pivoted to put its passenger door facing the covered waiting area. The entire community was here to receive my family when we stepped off the plane the first time, and in turn, we joined the crowd for countless welcomings and goodbyes. Departures had a ritual: after final hugs, the doors closed but the waving continued. Then the engines would rev (first one side, then the other) and well wishers would jump on motor cycles for a race to the last hill at the end of the runway, for final salutes as the gooney bird lifted off. This airplane was central to so many emotional moments that just looking at the picture—all these years later—touches a nerve.

One educational advantage that students in Lomalinda enjoyed was an unusual opportunity for work experience during high school. Kirk Garreans tells me he had the privilege of working alongside the DC-3 crew. Through his connections, he also came up with the fact that DC-3s continue to be active in the relief efforts in Haiti. Ponder that a moment: the youngest DC-3s are 65 years old, and still play a role in work-a-day aviation. Amazing.

Kirk also traced “our” DC-3 to its current owners, Dynamic Aviation, of Bridgewater, Virginia. The firm supplies “special-mission aviation solutions,” with over 150 aircraft doing commercial charter, fire management, sterile insect application, airborne data acquisition and other tasks. Before writing my first post, I was 90% certain I’d found the airplane, but Kirk’s information locked it. Dynamic Aviation restored the craft (N47E) to its original, 1943, Air Force paint job and insignia, and renamed it “Miss Virginia.” Here it is:



Finally, Kirk reported that Miss Virginia was part of the twenty-six plane, 75th Anniversary Fly-In to Oshkosh. Several nice videos are posted on You-Tube. Here is one:



A tip of the wings to all who participated in this conversation.

(My earlier post is here.)

I have been reminded lately that every day is a bonus, and that gifts sometimes come in strange packages.

In January, after I posted a review of Malcolm Magee’s book on Woodrow Wilson, we became Facebook friends and discovered how much we have in common. Recently he noted that next week he will be celebrating the tenth anniversary of an automobile collision that severed both of his legs (doctors were able to reattach one of them) and twice stopped the beating of his heart. From the distance of ten years he writes, “the accident has been a gift to me.”

His story caused me to count back and realize that this spring marked the thirtieth anniversary of a similar experience in my own life. And yes, it was a gift.

In the spring of 1980, I was enjoying marriage and parenthood, but undergoing trial-by-fire at the hands of my junior high students. Combined, my responsibilities left me exhausted, yet I sensed there was something more I should be doing. I just couldn’t puzzle out what that might be.

I decided to fast and ask God for some direction.

For four or five days I took only water. I had fasted that long once before, without distress, but mid-morning on a Tuesday, I began to feel horrible and decided to order the school lunch. That lunch hit my stomach like an anchor catching mud, but I figured I deserved it for so awkwardly ending a fast. I came back to teach the next day, wondering if maybe I had some kind of flu. Midday Thursday I told the kids not to kill each other, and put my head down on the desk. Finally, Friday, I called for a sub.

Over that weekend, I decided to take a full week off. Sunday I drove to school to lay out lesson plans. The copy machine malfunctioned, so I stretched out on the floor to try repairing it, in more pain than I had ever been in my life. Monday I saw a doctor. Wednesday morning I got an X-ray. Wednesday afternoon I got the results: a large mass in my abdomen could either be a ruptured appendix or colon cancer, more likely the latter, as the appendicitis would have already killed me, several days previously. I went into surgery Thursday, thinking I had advanced cancer.

But it actually was the appendix. I suspect I was alive because my fast had shut down my intestines, slowing the spread of the infection. I came home from the hospital to six weeks of forced rest.

They were good weeks for sitting and thinking. To begin with, I had the joy of knowing I had received a powerful and direct answer to prayer. I had asked God for something more, and for direction, and now He was at work to give me that, and to teach me some valuable lessons.

During my three years of teaching, I had banked nearly six weeks of sick leave because . . . well, I would work even with a ruptured appendix. My primary motivation had been fear. I knew what my junior-high students could do, even when I was there. It terrified me what they might do when I was gone. After my surgery, I realized how much I needed to let go of that.

I also tried to calculate how many Sabbaths I had passed over to do school work: probably something near the number of days I was confined now at home. It struck me that God will collect His Sabbaths one way or another.

Magee notes the “odd progression from suffering to hope” that Paul speaks of in Romans 5. Before the accident he had been “wrestling with the conflict between faith and reason,” so much so that the denomination in which he had pastored expelled him. He reports that after the accident, “for whatever reason those two quit fighting in my head.”

I had been looking for that “something more.” We had already been looking for a new church, one that did a better job of teaching the Bible, but with time to sit and talk with my wife, we realized that we needed to accelerate the effort. Once we did find a church we liked, we experienced the greatest burst of spiritual growth in our lives. Our marriage grew stronger. Our parenting grew more effective, as did my teaching. I had already been considering teaching overseas with a mission organization. After my six weeks at home, it became my passion. It took four years to reach Colombia, but the decade that followed provided both the most fascinating and fulfilling years of my career, and the richest family years. By coincidence, Magee’s father had served as a pilot on the same Bible translation center in the years just before I got there, and his sisters had attended the same little school where I came to teach.

In these ten additional years since his injuries, Magee married off all of his children, watched them spread around the world, and welcomed five grandchildren. In my own additional thirty, I added my last two children, raised all five, watched them spread around the world, and sometime in the next week expect to welcome my fifth grandchild. These have been rich years for both of us, every day a gift.

I am trying to be a novelist, and for each of the stories I have in mind, I already know the endings. I also know how my own story ends: Someday I will leave this body behind and step into the presence of Christ, wearing a new body. In crafting a novel, the protagonist often suffers one big set-back about one-third of the way through the story, and a second major setback at the two-thirds mark. Yet oftentimes, these apparent setbacks turn out to be gifts. My appendectomy came at age thirty, and was a gift. This month, at sixty, I have started treatment for prostate cancer. If this is my second setback, I still have a third of my earthly story ahead of me, if not in actual number of days, at least in narrative content.

But even if I have another thirty years, I get them one bonus day at a time. And I’m going to watch and see how God turns this cancer into a gift.

(Note: I have a daughter who works for Joni Eareckson Tada and Joni’s ministry to the disabled. At the same time I learned of my cancer, Joni went public with hers. On her website I found a link to a very helpful article by John Piper, “Don't Waste Your Cancer.”)

(A couple of weeks ago, over on Facebook, my daughter-in-law asked respondents to list their top three life goals and report on whether these had been accomplished. I like Facebook, but it has the problem of dropping things off the bottom of the page. I put some serious thought into my answer, so am reposting it here with some minor reworking.)

Angie,
One goal I had from youth was to see if I couldn't leave the world a better place than when I found it. That is not the kind of goal one finishes and checks off, but I think I can look back on some places where I have exerted some energy in that direction, and on some accomplishments that give me satisfaction. My years in Colombia were very well spent, and whenever I see a public bus in Visalia, I have the satisfaction of knowing my efforts—thirty years ago—were important in getting that system started. I also recognized from a young age that one aspect of this goal would mean finding the right person to marry, and making her life richer for having married me. Another would be raising children who would also leave the world better than they found it. Many of my friends either put off having kids, or had no kids at all, partly on the idea that the world was too crowded and each additional child would be a negative. I felt the total number of people wasn't the problem, but rather the ratio of givers to takers. I think, by God's grace, that Vicki and I have managed to improve on that ratio.

Another goal was to get a well-rounded education. My early heroes were Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. They were interested in almost everything, and not just knowledgeable, but contributors in almost every area where they had interests. Again, no one with this kind of goal can ever say they have arrived. There is always something else to learn. But I deeply enjoy the wide variety of interests and fields where I have some understanding. For me, a broad education requires travel and familiarity with foreign languages. I have traveled extensively, and not just the superficial organized tours or cruises, but going places and involving myself in the lives of the local people. That has added enormous richness to my life. I have a rudimentary reading knowledge of all the major Romance languages, and general use of Spanish, but I still want to learn some Chinese, some Japanese, some Turkish, and better Portuguese. If I continue to lose my hearing, I may have to settle for only reading knowledge, but I don't ever plan to be done.

I also wanted to know why I was here on Earth in the first place. That involved the question of whether or not there is such a person as God, and if so, what God's nature might be, and what this God might expect from me. Again, this is not a goal which one completes and then moves on to something new. I have come to a certainty that God does exist. I reached that conclusion 38 years ago, and each passing year has added to my certainty. But finite creatures can never completely understand an infinite God. There is always something else for God to reveal about Himself. I believe I understand the most important thing God expects of me, and that was settled 38 years ago. But again, when God is finally done expecting new things of me here, He will graduate me to eternity and I can really start learning why He made me in the first place.

Of my other goals, the most important was that I wanted to write. I've written lots of little things, and I'm getting to the big ones. It is an important goal to me, but the other things have all ranged above it. I've also enjoyed teaching, but mainly for the way as it has allowed me to pursue the more important goals. During each era in my life, there have been special, short-term goals, but these have been the goals that I carried with me for the journey.